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Comment by brango | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know anything about the credibility of the Disclosure Project[1]? I think something like 100+ ex-service personnel testified under oath that they'd witnessed UFO activity.

If 100+ people testified to seeing me do something illegal, a court would convict me (barring exceptional counter-evidence).

Having researched things as best I can I am now of the opinion they're already here, based mainly on the number, diversity and credibility of witnesses (e.g. ex-military personnel, former nuclear military personnel, Air Force, etc, not that any I know anything beyond that).

[1] http://www.disclosureproject.org

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I looked over some of them, and this isn't very reliable. Eyewitness reports aren't terribly credible in the best of situations. Eyewitness reports of people in stressful careers often working long overnight hours aren't credible at all.

Our memories are terrible, our brains make stuff up when confused, and sleep deprived dreams are very hard to distinguish from reality. Add in the large amount of amphetamines used in the military during that period, the very secretive weapons testing going on, and things like MK-ULTRA and these seem really far fetched.

> people in stressful careers often working long overnight hours

Doesn't look like that's the case for all of those witnesses. A lot of them seem like engineers - people that are paid for their minds (including their memory), rather than their head count.

http://www.disclosureproject.org/access/aboutexecsumm.shtml

They are still all humans, and everything I listed is present in virtually all humans. Having an exceptional mind does not prevent this.

IIRC some UFOs were tracked by multiple independent radar stations simultaneously.

UFOs on radar have a wide range of non-alien explanations, military testing or some bizarre weather event that happens incredibly infrequently for example. I will readily admit there are probably radar readings that no one can explain. That doesn't even count as proof of alien contact, and using that to support the claims made by the disclosure project is madness.

So, if we can't trust their memories in those occasions (which I agree is problematic), why are we trusting them with doing their jobs under such conditions?

I'd like to add that it might not be that all events happened under strenuous (personal) situations (and who knows how much evidence like recordings or other stuff might have been buried)

> why are we trusting them with doing their jobs under such conditions?

Process, process, process. Or "train as you'll fight" in more bellicose terms. Drill and rote is the only way to get fallible humans to do the correct thing regardless of environment and conditions.

However it's when things occur for which there's no process in place that you need flexible, quick-thinking NCOs and officers. And that's achieved by constantly putting them into those scenarios, as the British Army learned in its 'small conflicts' since WW2. Analyse, assess, plan and react within minutes.

Unfortunately the higher echelons seldom retain that capability after years in stuffy corridors. It would be interesting to study the proportion of UFO "affirmations" originating from sharp-end military personnel versus desk-jockeys. I reckon the latter will be the vast majority.

Their jobs rarely include remembering exactly what happened at three AM on a certain night. Plus, these claims are often one event over years of working this job, you can't expect perfection out of people.

Strenuous situations just make eyewitness accounts more likely to be terrible, our brain can screw up for no reason at all. Or a mundane reason, like skipping breakfast.

This makes claims of contact with aliens giving us advanced technology. I can imagine all sorts of possibly buried evidence that would make me believe that. Until some of it comes out, the eyewitness accounts are not reliable evidence.

Think about this - since mid 2000-2010 we have 1 or 2 billions of smartphone users (and a few hundred millions of older phones with cameras). And those billions of people have been using them for over a decade. Now the question - where are the photos of anything extraterrestrial?

And no, secrecy doesn't apply here really. People manage to take pics of secret military hardware, of terrorist leaders, of practically anything anywhere.

Well I did watch a film on Netflix ("UFOs: The Best Evidence Ever (Caught on Tape)"), but even in that it was obvious some was CGI - they had analysed it and reported it as such.

It's quite an old documentary so videos are pre-smartphones and pre-widespread availability of CGI software. But that'd be the other problem. If you search for "UFO" on Youtube there's loads of footage, but it could all just be CGId.

If these are real, is it alien or highly advanced Earth tech? It doesn't really matter from the perspective of if these aircraft are able to manoeuvre how they are reported to, the tech is obviously centuries ahead of what is publicly acknowledged and available now.

The main problem I have with analogy to a court of law is witnesses corroboration only works if all the witnesses are describing the same event, or are at least a series of deeply interrelated specific events local on a particular person or place or entity.

If witnesses are all talking about a series of separate events all over the globe at different times that aren't associated with each other, those claims are all systematically vulnerable to biases and don't serve to reinforce one another.

True, but some of the events had multiple independent witnesses reporting what sounds like the same object as it travelled overland.

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